Contextualizing Theology in the South Pacific

The Shape of Theology in Oral Cultures

Randall G. Prior

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532658570
  9781532658587
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532658594
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

This book engages with a widespread contemporary dilemma--how do we do theology in a context where the cultures of the people are oral and not literate? The nations of the South Pacific, from their missionary beginnings, inherited an approach to theology that was dominated by Western cultural categories. The global movement of contextualization began to impact upon Pacific churches in the 1960s, and challenged this inherited approach. Significant changes have resulted, but the dilemma has remained. The dominant approach is still one that is defined by and better suited to literate cultures. The consequence is that theology remains an alien enterprise, distant from the life of the local churches, and distant from the hearts and minds of the indigenous people. In facing the dilemma, this book exposes the fundamental differences between primary oral cultures and primary literate cultures, and identifies the key factors that lie at the heart of the theological problem. By addressing each of these in turn, the author then paves the way ahead. He offers a methodology for theology that is rooted within the oral cultural context of the South Pacific . . . and potentially in any context where oral cultures are the norm. The consequences for theology and for theological education are profound.

1

Tracing the Movement of the Contextualization of Theology

Having set the introductory framework and foundations of this book, it is important now to trace the international movement of the contextualization of theology. It is this movement that has not only had a remarkable impact on the evolution of Christian theology over the last two generations, but relevant to this book, the struggles involved in this movement have left their own deep imprint on the evolution of theology in the South Pacific.

Context-free Western Theology

In 1889, the Student Volunteer Movement in the United States adopted the now famous dictum, “the evangelization of the world in this generation,”44 and at the turn of the century in Western missionary circles, “the mood in both church and state was forward-looking in terms of progress and expansion, with a triumphant expectation that this would be ‘the Christian century.’”45 For some, this was a scientifically calculated expectation. In the year 1900, Norwegian Missionary Society General Secretary, Lars Dahle, made a mathematical prediction, based on the previous one hundred years of statistics, that “by 1990, the entire human race would be won for the Christian faith.”46

The first international missionary conference was held during this same momentous period, in Edinburgh in 1910. Missiologist Gerald Anderson describes it as “the milestone event” in Christian mission, which came at a time of high enthusiasm in the missionary endeavor, and the missionary obligation was considered a self-evident axiom to be obeyed, not to be questioned. Edinburgh was primarily concerned with strategy, consultation, and cooperation to complete the task of evangelizing the world; the Great Commission of Christ was the only basis needed for missions.47

Two prominent international leaders in Christian mission, Robert Speer and John Mott, spoke at the opening and closing occasions respectively. Speer offered a challenge to all members to anticipate “the immediate conquest of the world,” while Mott concluded the assembly with the declaration that “the end of the conference is the beginning of the conquest.”48 This whole era was marked by a particular form of globalization, the purpose of which was to “extend the message of the Christ and His church through the whole world.”49

It was an era marked also by a specific approach to theology, one that Schreiter has called “theology as sure knowledge”50, accompanied by an assumption that this form of theology was universal, supra-cultural and context-free. Most especially through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was this form and this assumption that “dominated the theological scene.”51 It became the normative view of theology, so that “when people think of theology, they think of this kind of theology.”52

Increasingly, commentators on the history of Christian mission and its accompanying Christian theology endorse this viewpoint. David Bosch speaks of the period of missionary expansion through the nineteenth century, leading into the twentieth, as being fanned by the combination of Enlightenment categories and the 18th century revival movements (“awakenings”). It was these that nurtured missionary fervor, first in America, and then in Europe. In particular, he describes the period 1800–1950 as the “era of non-contextualization”53 in both Protestant and Roman Catholic mission.

In each case, theology (singular) had been defined once and for all and now simply had to be “indigenized” in Third World cultures, without, however, surrendering any of its essence. Western theology had universal validity, not least since it was the dominant theology. The Christian faith was based on eternal, unalterable truth, which had already been stated in its final form, for instance in ecclesiastical confessions and policies.54

Bosch records that for “the father of nineteenth century Protestant missiology,” Gustav Warneck, Christian mission was founded on both monotheism and the “Great Commission” (Matthew 28:18–20). It operated on four assumptions; first, of the absoluteness and superiority of the Christian religion; secondly, its universal acceptability; thirdly, its superior achievements in mission fields; fourthly, its superior strength over against all other religions.55

In accord with Bosch, in his foundational work on “Gospel and Culture,” Lesslie Newbigin describes the era of Western missionary expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the era, not of context-free theology, but of “false contextualization.”56 Newbigin considered that during this era, missionaries assumed that their own distinctive cultural approach to theology and the gospel was culture-free, able to be applied to any and every culture, and essentially having the same outward appearance in all cultures. Rightly or wrongly, this, he said, became the heritage and perception of the Third World recipients of much of Western missionary activity through this era.57

Another important commentator on this topic is the Jesuit missiologist, Peter Schineller, who notes the growing awareness of the fact that the missionary expansion of the Christian faith, from the Western to the non-Western world, has been accompanied by “the myth of superiority of Western European culture,” and the transplanting of Western Christianity into foreign soil, “showing little respect and often disdain, for traditional local cultures.”58

As illustrated in the diary entries of John Geddie, and affirmed in recent times by indigenous leaders of the church, that same thinking dominated Protestant mission work in the New Hebrides from its beginnings in the nineteenth century. “It is very sad to look back over the history of the church on Tanna and realize that from the beginning in 1839, and for a very long time afterwards, the approach of the Western missionaries towards our culture was one of rejection. They operated within and promoted their own culture.”59

It was the assumptions about the validity and authority of Western culture, with its particular forms of Christianity and Christian theology that led to an uncritical imposition onto cultures and contexts around the world. As a recipient of this imperial approach to mission, wide...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Tracing the Movement of the Contextualization of Theology
• Chapter 2: The Contextualization of Theology within the South Pacific
• Chapter 3: The Voice of South Pacific Islanders
• Chapter 4: Methodology: The Key to Contextualization
• Chapter 5: A Case Study
• Chapter 6: Conclusions
• Bibliography